Milwaukee County

Milwaukee County is a member of the first cohort of jurisdictions to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and racial and ethnic disparities in jail usage. This capstone award enables Milwaukee County to continue its participation in the SJC Network and maintain progress achieved during previous rounds of funding, both in reducing jail populations and increasing fairness, while sustaining momentum for local system reform.

Milwaukee County is a member of the first cohort of jurisdictions to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and disparities in jail usage. This award enables Milwaukee County to build on and secure progress achieved during previous rounds of implementation funding in reducing jail populations, increasing fairness, and advancing racial equity while sustaining local system reform momentum.

Milwaukee is an original member of the Safety and Justice Challenge Network (the Network), the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and disparities in jail usage. Under previous awards, Milwaukee engaged in a structured, collaborative process to identify local drivers of unnecessary jail incarceration, generated an ambitious plan to address them, and implemented the plan over a two-year period with technical assistance and guidance from a consortium of national experts. This award enables Milwaukee to sustain and expand its reform work, implementing changes across an array of criminal justice processing and decision points with the goal of achieving further reductions in local incarceration and reducing racial and ethnic disparities.

Following a national competition in 2015, Milwaukee County was among twenty jurisdictions selected for inclusion in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. A previous award supported Milwaukee County’s participation in a structured data analysis and planning process, assessing local drivers of jail incarceration, setting reduction targets, and developing a plan to achieve them. Resulting plans were scored by an expert panel on the basis of ambition, comprehensiveness, and achievability, and eleven, including Milwaukee County’s, were selected for implementation funding on the basis of this review. This two-year award enables Milwaukee County to institute changes aimed at reducing local incarceration and disparities in jail usage in accordance with its implementation plan.

Twenty jurisdictions have been selected, following a nationwide competition, to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network of sites committed to finding ways to safely and sustainably reduce unnecessary jail incarceration. The Safety and Justice Challenge Network is at the core of the Foundation’s initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. Awards to these jurisdictions support their participation in a structured data analysis and planning process aimed at assessing drivers of local incarceration and developing multi-stakeholder action plans to address them.